The story is going somewhere plot-wise, but I’m still completely in the dark as to why things are happening. Athen had offered to give some background, but Ruby sadly refused to listen which I don’t understand given her situation. There’s also been a relatively large reveal about Athen that one wouldn’t have expected though I won’t reveal it here.

The vocabulary and use of language really help to create the world. There are so many things I should be highlighting and annotating, but I’m resisting the urge as I’m reading this solely for pleasure and don’t intend on sharing notes/annotations on this one.

I really need to finish it, renew it, or return it as I think it was due at the library on 2/27.

60db seems like the start of what could be an interesting podcast/audio discovery app/engine. It has the appearance of wanting to be like Nuzzel for the audio space based on their announcement, but isn’t quite there yet based on my quick look through their site. On first blush it doesn’t seem much better than Huffduffer and doesn’t have a follower model of any sort, but perhaps that could change. Folks watching the podcasting and audio discovery space should keep an eye on it though.

Sadly, at least for now, the app appears to focus on short form audio (3-8 minutes in length) from major media content producers who are already syndicating audio in podcast format. I haven’t used the iOS (no Android app yet) app, but the web interface allows one to pick from a list of about 20 broad category options (news, sports, politics, kids, etc.) to “customize” one’s feed.

Hopefully in the future it may build itself out a bit more like Nuzzel by requesting data from one’s Facebook or Twitter feeds to better customize an algorithmic feed for better general audio discovery. Maybe it will allow a follower model based on social graph for improved discovery. One might also like to see custom settings for podcast story length, so one could choose between short hit audio, which they currently have in abundance, and longer form stories for lengthier commute times.

For the moment however, they seem to have recreated a slightly better and more portable version of news radio for the internet/mobile crowd. Perhaps future iterations will reveal more?​​​

Introducing 60dB
By 60dB | Oct. 27th, 2016In January, our team started on a journey to reimagine what the daily radio experience could be. We brainstormed in coffee shops, around kitchen tables, in basements and in tiny garages. We thought about all the ways technology has changed our lives, and marveled at the incredible durability of good old terrestrial radio. We compared digital audio products (mostly podcasting apps). We talked about the types of audio stories we wanted to hear.

And we quickly realized that there was a huge gap between what’s available today and what we wanted as listeners.

We love two things about radio: its simplicity and its great stories. Whether it’s a deeply reported news story or an interview with a favorite athlete or coach, a well-informed conversation between opinionated people or something that just makes us laugh, radio is always there.

But radio could never touch on the unique interests of every listener. We’ve set out to create a listening experience that is much more diverse. Already, we’ve discovered lots of remarkable audio stories out there, ones that are wonderful but haven’t been heard by a wider audience. And we are just getting started.

We chose the name 60dB because it represents the volume of conversation. The service represents a first public step in what we anticipate will be a long journey.

60dB (pronounced “sixty dee bee”) delivers a simple listening experience. After onboarding, 60dB delivers a personalized stream of stories for you based on your social graph, personal interests and engagement on the service.

Hello, World!
Whether you are into sports or politics, celebrity gossip or international news, or you just want to be entertained, 60dB helps you stay smart about the topics and parts of the world that you personally care about. The experience is unique for everyone, representing each individual’s diverse interests. This diversity isn’t possible through traditional radio.

Like your radio, you can just turn on 60dB and listen when you hop into your car in the morning. No need to plan ahead and program it. No need to hunt-and-peck for stories or shows you care about. With 60dB, good stories find you, whether you have 10 minutes to listen, or two hours.

Great stories inform, enlighten, entertain and connect us. On 60dB, you’ll hear stories from a wide variety of voices — some you might expect, and some unexpected ones, too. You’ll hear stories from Marketplace and the BBC, sports from CBS, Fox and The Ringer, and comedy from Late Night with Seth Meyers & The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. We have business news from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. And we will bring you audio stories you won’t hear anywhere else — interviews with reporters from The Atlantic, Fusion, Mic, Motherboard and The New York Times. This is just the beginning.

Short stories, generally just a few minutes long, are central to the 60dB listening experience. Quick Hits is where you’ll find a personalized stream of stories we think you’ll enjoy. In-Depth is where you’ll find longer stories, shows and podcasts. When you find a story you really want to hear but don’t have time for right now, you can save it for later.

Your feed refreshes as you listen; that means you can spend more time enjoying great stories, and less time finding them. As you listen, you can skip stories you’re not into, favorite stories you like, and share stories with friends. As you do, we listen to you. We learn about your interests and refine your experience to include fewer of the stories you’re not interested in, and more of the stuff you love. But we will never stop trying to surprise you.

60dB is available starting this morning, via the App Store. We’re starting with iOS for now, with plans to offer 60dB for the Amazon Echo and for Android devices soon.

Our vision for 60dB is to deliver great stories to you anywhere you have a speaker, whether that’s in your home, in the car or on the go.
We don’t think we have solved every problem. But we have something worth sharing — something with a lot of promise. We still have a long way to go. But we’ll learn faster with your help.

We’d love to hear from you about 60dB. Please drop us a line at feedback@60dB.co to share your feedback (the good as well as the critical).

Your world is about to get bigger, one story at a time.

If you enjoyed reading this, please click the ♥ below. This will help share the story with others.

Guests: Mathew Ingram
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One of them is creating a simple mobile workflow to take headlines from Twitter and get them into my reading queue. Previously I had used an IFTTT.com recipe to take things I “liked” in my Twitter stream to strip off URLs and put them into Pocket for reading later. In fact, very few of my thousands of likes in Twitter are traditional “likes” because I’m really using that functionality to indicate “I’d like to read the article linked to in this Tweet at a later date”. Somewhere in the past couple of months I’ve mused to at least one person on the PressForward team that it would be nice to have a simple indicator to send articles from Twitter to PressForward like this, but even if I were building it all by hand, this would be a bit further down the list of priorities. What to do in the erstwhile?

RSS has long been going out of fashion, particularly among the major social silos who want to keep you in their clutches, but it dawned on me to check to see if Pocket or Instapaper provide RSS feeds. Sure and gloriously enough, they do! In fact, Pocket has an unread feed, an archive feed, an all items feed (that includes both of the other two), and as a lovely additional touch, they’ve even got the ability to make feeds private. Instapaper has RSS feeds too, though they were a bit more hidden and took a right click/view source along with a manual completion of their base URL. The nice part is that one can take these RSS feeds and plug them straight into one’s PressForward RSS feedet voilà there they are on my own site! (From the viewpoint of PressForward, this is also very close to being able to nominate items directly from Twitter.) While this is more of a PESOS feed, the result is a no-brainer and provides a near real-time experience that’s more than adequate for my needs (at least until yet another silo goes down).

And as added bonuses, if I feel like using Pocket or Instapaper from time to time, I can do so without loss of data along the stream and the small handful of people with whom I interact on Pocket won’t notice the fact that I’ve disappeared.

For the millionth time, G-d bless RSS, a wonderful tool I use every single day.